Tag: Literature

Burn Baby Burn…Celebrating Banned Books!

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Photo courtesy of bannedbooksweek.org

Every year thousands of readers across the nation celebrate the rebels of literature during Banned Books Week. September 26th–October 2nd marks the week for 2021, and the current list of books can be found here. These writers join the distinguished group of storytellers who have dared to tell the tales that invoke deep thought, invite change, and incite social justice.

Every year the list grows longer and longer as newer writers add their message to the mix. Here at The Spellbinding Shelf, we appreciate these writers’ ability to freely express themselves while challenging the status quo and pushing boundaries. Check out some of our staff’s favorite picks.

Staff Writer Paul Stanton

My favorite banned book is Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home. A non-fiction graphic novel about Bechdel’s childhood relationship with her father, Fun Home is one of my favorite memoirs, but it has often been challenged and banned because it deals with the queerness of both Alison Bechdel and her closeted father.

The Comic Book Legal Defense Fund has an excellent legal history of the challenges against the book here. Bechdel is famous for her comic strip Dykes to Watch out For and for coining the “Bechdel-Wallace Test”—a feminist media criticism tool.

Editor-in-Chief Sharon Enck

While some of my favorite banned books are classics such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Fahrenheit 451, I have recently added a new favorite. John Green’s Looking for Alaska is a heartbreaking tale of grief, and the search to find one’s self. It has been banned for being too sexually explicit (a scene describing oral sex) as well as offensive language and drug/alcohol use.

Green, whose talent lies in tackling the complexity of young adult lives, responded to his challengers, “If you have a world view that can be undone with a novel, let me submit that the problem is not with the novel.”

Staff Writer Lauren Kuhman

I think there can be a perception that banned books are a thing of the past but books, articles, and the written word are constantly being censored. One of my favorite books is Angie Thomas’ The Hate U Give. Published in 2017, the young adult novel follows a 16-year-old Starr Carter as she witnesses the murder of her best friend Kahlil in a police shooting. The novel addresses police brutality and racism and was banned by school officials in Katy, Texas for “pervasive vulgarity and racially-insensitive language…not its substantive content or the viewpoint expressed” (as cited in Gomez, 2018). However, the book was eventually reinstated (with the caveat of needing parental permission to check it out) when a local student petitioned for the book’s return.

Managing Editor Jade Stanton

While there are many great classics that have found their way to the banned books list, my personal favorite is J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. This well-known novel follows Holden Caulfield on his two day trip home after being expelled from prep school. Throughout his journey, Holden rails against the phoniness of the adult world and the inevitable corruption that comes from being a part of adult society.

This book is often banned and challenged for its adult themes—namely cursing, alcohol abuse, and sex. It strikes me as especially ironic that a book about preserving innocence while becoming aware of the harsh realities of the world is often challenged and considered inappropriate for high schoolers. Despite its adult themes and controversies, The Catcher in the Rye is lauded for its relatability among high school audiences.

Rebellious writers and readers of the world unite on this last day of Banned Books Week!

Book Review

Published on by edolehanLeave a comment

Ghosts of You by Cathy Ulrich

Publisher: Okay Donkey Press  
Genre: Flash Fiction  
Pages: 176 pages   
Format: Paperback 
My Rating: 3/5  
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Summary

In this flash fiction collection a myriad of victims come alive and show themselves beyond the circumstances they find themselves in. Each piece is set in motion by another murdered woman—including a girl, teacher, mermaid, and others—but there is more to each story than just the inciting tragedy. These stories are laden with grief, intrigue, occasional mystery, and ruminations of what might have been. These are stories of murdered women, but there is more here than meets the eye.   

Thoughts

This collection was thought provoking through and through. It is not often that we see something that seems so familiar, in this case the victim, given new life and dimension. Yet that is exactly what Ulrich has done, she has given a compelling voice to characters who in the past would have been hard to cast as anything but flat. Each story, no matter its length, feels both diverse and dynamic and these pieces are in heavy conversation with one another.

While this collection was overall both interesting and innovate, there were times when it felt too repetitive. When reading one story after the next they start to bleed together and the murdered mermaid becomes hard to tell apart from the murdered babysitter and the murdered girlfriend. That is not to say that there is no joy to be had from reading this collection, but it is perhaps a read best done over an extended period of time.

I would like to thank TNBBC Publicity for providing this ARC
in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

5 Short Story Collections to Make you Fall in Love with Short Stories

Published on by edolehan1 Comment

Even amongst bookish people, the topic of short stories can be a divisive one. Some readers see short stories as too tedious or time-consuming, while others readers might complain that they feel short stories lack the depth of a novel. Adding to this conundrum, some readers were never properly introduced to short stories and now feel too overwhelmed by the genre and don’t even know where to start. Whatever the case may be, we here at The Spellbinding Shelf celebrate short stories, inviting you to abandon all prior convictions with our comprehensive list of five collections that are bound to make you fall in love with short stories.

Her Body and Other Parties—Carmen Maria Machado.
Machado is known for the macabre undertones in her writing and for creating female characters who are not always wholesomely motivated. The ease of her prose makes this collection incredibly alluring, but there is more to it than that—these stories are dark, empowering, nuanced, sinister, and above all else, great fun to read.

Civilwarland in Bad Decline—George Saunders.
This is a powerfully imaginative collection that tests the elasticity of language. It doesn’t matter if Saunders is writing about subversive capitalistic greed or an amusement park that is reminiscent of West World, these tales are impeccably crafted. Each story presents a strange new world that will leave the reader intrigued and wanting more.

Stories of Your Life and Others—Ted Chiang.
In this collection, Chiang challenges the notion of what short stories are capable of. He builds dense worlds rich with unique language and dynamic characters. He experiments with time to decrease the flow of information to a drip, and yet every page will leave you yearning to know the tales extraordinary conclusion. Ted Chiang is an author worth reading again and again. 

Magic for Beginners—Kelly Link.
While all of the authors on this list so far experiment with blending the lines between genre and literary fiction, none are so adept at it as Kelly Link. That is not to say that her stories are gimmicky or weighed down by superfluous magic systems and supernatural characters. On the contrary, Link’s stories are full of emotional truth and excavate the far reaches of the imagination. Simply put, these stories are magical, but their power does not come from casting spells, but rather, in their ability to entrance their reader.

The Best American Short Stories Series—series edited by Heidi Piltor.

Since 1978, the Best American Short Stories series has been a literary staple with anthologies cultivated by great writers such as Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, Margaret Atwood, Tobias Wolff, Annie Proulx, Lorrie Moore, Roxane Gay, and most recently Anthony Doerr. Each year, this anthology puts forward twenty short stories that represent the best published short fiction. Each collection offers new worlds of enchantment, heartbreak, and excitement. There is no better place to find scores of talented writers, and also a plethora of publications, to further explore short stories—which by now you’re bound to love. 

5 Books that Marked Changing Times

Published on by Abhilasha MandalLeave a comment

History is a rolling saga of love and war, and we are irrevocably changed by both. Generations of great writers have documented the change of times and the novelties they brought with them, and so I’ve decided to give you a few books that have truly marked the end of an era.

Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind fondly remembers the last golden days of the South antebellum, before the Civil War wrenched families apart and changed the landscape of American society.

Scarlett O’Hara, a blooming southern belle, and Rhett Butler, an outrageous pragmatist, fall in and out of love in this classic as they struggle with the pain of losing loved ones, drastically altered social positions and wartime hardships.

Mother is the most popular work of Maxim Gorky. Based on real-life events that Gorky was personally connected to, this novel is about the spiritual awakening of a young factory worker and his careworn mother in Tsarist Russia.

Pavel Vlasov starts out by taking after his hard-drinking father, but soon meets a group of revolutionaries and begins to get an education in politics and philosophy. He stops drinking and undergoes a quiet transformation into a sharp, receptive young man.

This incites curiosity in Pelageya Nilovna, Pavel’s mother. After a lifetime of abuse and poverty, she overcomes her illiteracy and political ignorance to become a revolutionary. It is because of this display of willpower and strength of character, Nilovna Vlasova, not Pavel, is considered by many to be the true protagonist of the novel.

In one of the greatest love stories to emerge from World War I, Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms is set against the background of the Italian front, where Lieutenant Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver, falls in love with Catherine Barkley, a British nurse’s aide.

The stark reality of war brings real affection out of the playful simulation of love that the two initially engage in.

Frederic and Catherine are symbolic of the countless men and women who were kept apart by social and geographical boundaries in those uncertain times. This classic is about the illusion of glory in war and the courage to bid it farewell.

One cannot think of World War I without remembering the concurrent movement of the suffragettes, which spanned decades before and after the war.

My Own Story is the autobiography of Emmeline Pankhurst, founder of the Women’s Social and Political Union. Ghostwritten by Rheta Childe Dorr, it is a detailed memoir of Pankhurst’s work as an activist and the long road to electoral equality between British men and women.

The Diary of a Young Girl is a compilation of the diary entries of a pre-adolescent Jewish girl in Germany, forced into hiding with her family by the onset of the Holocaust.

Anne Frank kept a thorough record of the two years she spent in the Secret Annex, the mortification of growing up among near-strangers with various quirks, the lack of privacy and, of course, the uncertainty of life itself.

This piece of literature is remarkable for its unaffected style of prose and the sheer truthfulness and poignancy of the emotions portrayed on the pages. Anne Frank is a literary icon, immortalized through her work as an unwitting historian.

Book Review

Published on by edolehanLeave a comment

Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin

Publisher: Vintage, 2013
Genre: Literature
Pages: 176
Format: Paperback
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My Rating: 5/5 stars

Summary

When David’s girlfriend Hella flees the country without answering his marriage proposal, his life is plunged into emotional and financial turmoil. Left alone in Paris in the 1950s, he must find a way to support himself while his father denies him money in hopes of pressuring him into returning to the United States. For a season, David finds refuge in the apartment of a handsome Italian bartender named Giovanni. The two men begin a romantic relationship that plunges David into a moral crisis, dredging up an identity he had been running from. Ultimately, their affair is full of discovery, dependency, and loathing—coming to an inevitably tragic end.

Thoughts

What I most enjoyed about this book is how it fearlessly grapples with the topics of sexuality and masculinity. David and Giovanni’s relationship is enshrouded in a secret—David’s would-be-fiancé Hella—from the beginning, predestining it for a short lifespan. Further complicating their affair, societal pressure weighs the men down and warps their perception of one another. Simultaneous to this relationship playing out, Baldwin presents a secondary character who questions the reader’s view of masculinity: the always sharply dressed Guillaume, a man wealthy enough to force the young men who work for him—like Giovanni—into doing whatever he wants at risk of losing their jobs and having their reputations ruined. While Guillaume is not a particularly appealing character, there is no doubt that he has agency, a revolutionary concept—especially in 1956–for a homosexual male character who is not masculine presenting.

Baldwin furthers the work’s modern sensibilities, and my delight, by perfectly illustrating the “it’s complicated” relationship status on Facebook. Though this is not David’s first same-sex encounter, he finds himself blaming Giovanni as if he has been taken advantage of. This blame leads him to a personal affirmation that their affection for one another is unnatural, driving a wedge between the two men and highlighting the damage that shame and guilt can cause if woven into the emotional tapestry of a relationship; a theme that is universal beyond same-sex relationships, making this novel more accessible to a wider audience.   

What resonates most with me about this book, however, is how it examines the cost of living life authentically. David knows that he desires Giovanni more than anything else, and yet, for a chance at normalcy, he must deny his authentic self; Giovanni is a working-class immigrant who is running from normalcy in hopes of finding his authentic self; and Hella wishes to be an independent woman, but also feels that she cannot take full advantage of life without living in a traditionally domesticated way. These internal struggles showcase the damage that denying our authentic self can cause—not only internally, but to those nearest to us as well. 

Full of beautiful language and rich emotional landscapes, Giovanni’s Room is an incredibly accessible read and comes in at less than two hundred pages—making it a perfect addition to your pride month reading list. 

Guest blog post courtesy of Edward Dolehanty.